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The clamshell iBook had one very distinctive disadvantage: when the laptop world had finally arrived at a default display resolution of at least 1024x768, the iBook had an 800x600 display. This forced web designers (in a time before widely supported CSS or even responsive design) to design for the smaller viewport of the iBook instead of being able to take advantage of the higher-res displays of the rest of the world.

Peter Gabriel gave me his in ~2000 because I needed a crappy Mac to test our music streaming and downloading on. I liked the design, but was very underwhelmed by the hardware and software. In that way, it was good for testing. I remember it quickly ended up in a closet with some big elastic bands pushing something onto the trackpad button, since there was an online game at the time called "Hold The Button" with a leaderboard and we wanted to be #1.

Any more interesting tidbits to share about working with the man?

He used AOL (it was all still installed lol). He's a nice guy. His parties at his studio in Box were amazing. The studio is amazing because it's built on top of the mill pond and the floors are wood while it's in use, but then they pop off and it's glass above the water. I think his Up album is massively underrated.

Peter Gabriel's "Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ" is his seminal work, IMHO. Just an amazing piece of work. Bought the original CD in 1989, and got the SACD version recently. get goosebumps when playing the tracks at DSF64 resolution via roon. the track "A different drum", is truly inspired.

Ha! That 800x600 screen was the first thing I remembered about it, that the composite (or s-video) out…

It had a weird/custom TRRS adapter, I believe, to get analog video out.

Composite video out like an early Raspberry Pi

Yes but the actual connector was a skinnier jack that was common on other devices like Camcorders, iirc.

This is an architectural problem. These companies share their documents with externals, and the documents must behave normally to these externals. So it doesn't just have to look as intended, the external person also needs to be able to edit the documents with the CI fonts available.

One could imagine that access to the fonts could be restricted to the logged-in user, but that would mean that public documents that can be accessed without a login wouldn't have the specific fonts.


Google guarantees ChromeOS Flex support for each supported model for a certain amount of time, see https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11513094

It's been so long I had almost forgotten about this... there was also at some point a 3rd party camera app which had a secret setting (activated by entering some URL into iOS Safari), enabling the use of the volume buttons to trigger the shutter. When Apple found out, they banned the app from the App Store. Not much later, the iPhone's built-in camera app got that feature which we all take for granted now.


There was a time you could enter some url into ios safari and install cydia on the iphones in the apple store. They shut that inroad down pretty quick.


I remember watching a video of a guy doing that to a display phone at an Apple Store.

While that action was definitely not a good idea, it did encapsulate just how polished that jailbreak[1] was. The UX was identical to an App Store install page of the day. You tapped the price "FREE" and then tapped "INSTALL" and the phone would appear to install Cydia as though you had just used the App Store to do it.

[1]: https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Saffron


Cydia and jail breaking replaced hacking HP calculators for a few years for me.


Google Docs is in fact a text editor with Markdown support, see https://support.google.com/docs/answer/12014036


Been there, done that. After a bit of back and forth, Telekom basically recommended that I go and use one of the big SMTP servers and stop bothering them. While I hated myself for doing it, I eventually switched to Gmail for peace of mind.


Does Fastmail have any clout in Europe? I've been a customer for the better part of a decade (with my own domain name) and I've never had a mail delivery issue.


I was going to suggest Fastmail too. I don't know about Europe in particular but have been a very happy Fastmail customer for several years, running mail for 2 small corporations plus personal, zero problems ever.


Nope, but there are various good and cheap e-mail providers in EU, such as Soverin, Posteo, Mailbox, Migadu, Tuta, ...


Unfortunately some inbound servers will block emails if the originating server does not match the From: address.


If you control the domain, you can use SPF to designate Google as an authorized sender for your domain.


This is one of the reasons why I'm not planning to host my own e-mail server. It's not that I can't do it, but I don't want to sink time into investigating and working around/solving things like that.


The small boutique mail hosts are also much more tedious to deal with than any of the big players. So it depends on your recipients how much effort self-hosting is.


This used to be possible, I remember that I replaced Finder with some other app many years ago. I strongly assume that this doesn't work any more, though.


Yeah. Path Finder was a common power user tool.

I recall you used to be able to flip some bit somewhere to allow you to Quit the Finder, but I assume that's disappeared inside the encrypted and signed partition where Apple keeps all the things us stupid users shouldn't be allowed to touch.

But even then, you'd want more than just that, as when you tell the OS to "Reveal" a file or open a folder, that's the association I'd want to be able to change.

Honestly I'd really prefer the Windows XP File Explorer to the pile of crap the Finder has turned into.


  > I recall you used to be able to flip some bit somewhere to allow you to Quit the Finder
you can still do this with a hidden preference using command line:

  defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool true; killall Finder
[0] https://www.defaults-write.com/adding-quit-option-to-os-x-fi...

  > But even then, you'd want more than just that, as when you tell the OS to "Reveal" a file or open a folder, that's the association I'd want to be able to change.
yep, that should just be a normal setting like default browser (one thing i like about linux nowadays)


TinkerTool is a nice GUI app for this setting and a few others, see https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html


oh wow its been a long time; i forgot about that one, i'll have to download that again


Ah yes, thank you for reminding me - of course, it was Path Finder! You could even have it respond to "Reveal". Not sure any more if it was by renaming Path Finder to /Applications/Finder, or by changing its Bundle id to com.apple.finder, or some other trick.


"of course, it was Path Finder! You could even have it respond to 'Reveal'"

This still works. I have been using macs since 1985 and have always hated the Finder. In the days of classic Mac OS, my go to for file management was a desk accessory called DiskTop, which was great. Super fast and easy to operate from the keyboard.

When I switched to OSX, I needed something better than the Finder, chose Path Finder, and have been using it ever since. I have my complaints about it but have not been able to find anything I like better.


Further reading on this, very worthwhile IMHO: Paper Girl by Beth Macy, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Girl


Not sure if that's too much of a crutch for you, but it's quite easy to create an "Ask Gemini" shortcut that calls a Cloud Function and returns a spoken response. I use this on my HomePods all the time, and it's working great.


How do you do this on a HomePod? I could definitely see Apple limiting this to newer hardware, as a way to bump sales.


Let me get back to you on this, but it'll take me a few days

EDIT: Here you go, it's very barebones, but it's better than nothing (I hope): https://github.com/cockbrand/siri-gemini-shortcut

As you'd expect, the code is vibed by Gemini :)


I wouldn't expect this to happen, as Apple's resistance against this would be too strong. The data of Google's paying [enterprise] customers stays private as well, so the safeguards are in place already.


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